My 2016 is probably worth about that. This Summer it had a max-charge that would yield about 60 miles of range. That really means about 50 miles of range since it's quite unsettling to drive them to zero-miles of range (turtle mode). My Leaf might be worth $5000 but I suspect it's closer to $3000 since it's lost so much utility. It lacks the active cooling the 2019 and beyond got, which means the battery degraded (a little) faster and probably has about 15% fewer charge cycles and less extreme weather use (esp cold).

It is a somewhat good car for an urbanite. It's a compact 4-seater and 60 miles gets most folks to and from work plus a store trip or two. So, the car isn't yet useless. However, that's part of my chief concern. The car is in great shape other than the battery, yet it's going to get junked way before 150k miles with (at least what is now at @85k total mileage) a well cared for interior/exterior and undercarriage/suspension/brakes.

Why? Because replacing the battery totals the car. Nissan wants $12,000 for a new 40KWH battery for it (both nearby dealers quoted it the same). It is one of the few EVs you have battery swap options for but they rely on hacking the firmware (99.9% of EVs use DRM to lock you out of battery replacement). Once hacked, all you can get in the US is a used battery pack usually around 70%-85% capacity. Shame, but it's a better situation than most EVs where it's the dealer's price or the junkyard.

I bought the car 5 years ago and at that time it had a max range of 80 miles. Now this winter I'm down to 50 miles. I cannot drive the car to work anymore (60 miles round trip). Train fare would be $10.50 a day, require two transfers, and take 1.6 hours. The drive is 45 minutes.

A failed New Zealand company (EV Enhanced) tried to make a replacement battery that sounded really interesting. It was probably the fact that tipped me into buying the car originally. However, they have never delivered them even in New Zealand, AFAIK and their estimated prices are also sky high, last I checked. There does seem to be a Chinese CATL based replacement battery but nobody imports it and installs in the Leaf domestically (shops only install used/junked batteries). They have a 62KWH version with prismatic NMC cells. As an assembled unit it's $11,000 plus $2200 in shipping and import fees. That'd put my 2016 at about 250 miles per charge.

At those prices I could buy a lot of other cars, included a newer used Leaf. Ranges and $/mile vs my ICE cars isn't even close. I've put 30k miles on the car I originally gave $7k for. It's likely worth $3k now, based on what I see others like mine go for on Craigslist. My Leaf has been non-optimal in most $ terms. It also wears out tires much faster than my ICEs even with proper rotation). However, I like it's low-end torque, comfortable interior, heated everything, decent stereo/bluetooth, 110v cables (slow but super cheap charging), solid (regenerative) brakes, and good handling. It would be nice to keep it going but I'll probably consign it to the local EV shop when it dips @35 miles/charge.

No, it's definitely not a rich person's car. However, it's also sub-optimal in some ways.

The question is will anyone pull the plug does anyone have the will to pull the plug, who can actually make that decision?

I don't mean nominally either, I mean practically. Even if you are the CEO; giving the order to shut down you hyper-scaled AI/ML platform because someone some people from the 'safety' team you only hired to virtue signal in the first place say they think 'something' is happening. Its a career ending move, most likely, and you'll have to hang around and slug it out with half a nation of disgruntled 401k holders who saw the NASDAQ drop and are demanding the company start operating again.

Could president or some member of the joint-chiefs demand power be cut to the datacenter. Same problems what will people believe, what will the political fall out of 'blowing up the economy be'?

Now for the record I think this is all hype. These people are saying this stuff because what they really want you think is, 'omg omg if this technology is so powerful even the owners are afraid of it, it just has to be the next big thing, its like harnessing the atom was 70 years ago! BUY BUY FOMO BUY BUY' At no point is anything resembling the current state of the art over at OpenAI going to turn into 'Mike' (See the Moon is a Harsh Mistress). Its just marketing. However if a real synthetic intellect ever did appear AND start to have control over IRL events in any remotely unexpected ways I have little to no faith the organizations around it would recognize what was happening and respond appropriately. I suspect it takes more courage to pull the plug than most folks have.

Or.. Maybe.. The checks and balances are doing their thing and these ideologically captured judges are overreaching their authority and is getting corrected in the Supreme Court?

I watched all the stuff the GPP mentioned when I was young, and I actually watch a lot of PBS now; but not nearly as much and less and less all the time. Why because i am replacing it with youtube'ers who genuinely are better.

As great as Roy Underhill's or Norm Abrams' shows ever were, I learned more applicable wood working from Acorn to Arabella and Sampson Boat Co, or at least understood them finally. Same things with cooking, ATK is still amazing, and Julia and Pépin shaped me in the kitchen; but there is plenty out there now that is every bit as good and its not hard to find.

I loved PBS in the late 80s thru the late 90s, but the era is over.

blah blah

is an incredible value for the money, said everyone defending every government dollar every time..

Certainly in the era before ubiquitous highspeed internet access and pick your self-publishing video platform, those things were great.

They are obsolete now. There is a time when even where you have found something that worked, the need is gone and it is time to stop doing it.

Where would we deport them to?

That will just mean media is no longer produced in New York.

From a technical standpoint your are correct. From a practical standpoint there is something we all are not seeing.

The industry has customers that place a lot of value on relative anonymity. There isn't anything inherently illegal, immoral, or wrong with 'dark money' either it really isn't anyone's business what anyone else invests their personal wealth in. (beyond basic tax law enforcement etc, which yes privacy does complicate)

The industry also must certainly be aware they make quite a lot of money off players who are in fact sanctioned, using their platforms in complex laundering schemes and the like.

I don't see anyone who is running and IB, brokerage, or exchange wanting to just make all that go away. Maybe I am to cynical but if the people in those positions were really the types to say "hey we are willing to make less money, for the greater good" well there are at lot of things like know your customer standards and the like they'd have beefed up voluntarily already.

So I am left with there is a plan here we have not seen yet, like charging premiums for coin blending services or other various proxy ownership games like invite only trading of in house assets off chain.

One thing I am certain of nobody is trying to give the SEC radical transparency out of the goodness of the big hearts

 

The dumbest part of the entire thing is - a college campus is one place where it should be like super easy to find some folks to wager with. Maybe like I dunno talk to some of the guys in your hall, activity lounge, wherever.

Setup some squares - everyone can photo the board with their phones so there isn't any funny business. You could even like socialize and watch some of the sporting events, maybe find girls like sports to watch as well get a couple bags of chips and some sodas and actually have a good time?

Oh the best part some of these people you call 'friends' win and maybe you win next time. There is no house taking a cut...

i don't think a little friendly gambling with people know is to likely to get anyone into addiction or encourage people to take risks they can't really afford but commercial gambling be it on sports, prediction markets, or stocks is down right predatory. The pattern-day-trading rule exists for good reason - its to prevent Etrade from turning into Draft Kings, and it has worked. We probably need something like it for Sports/Prediction market betting. If you can't find 25k worth of assets to park in an account, then you should be limited to handful of bets/plays a week. That way people don't get hooked, and hopefully you don't get people playing with money they can't afford to lose as often because, by virtue of the fact if you can keep it on account for x days you don't urgently need it.

I was paid $35 per donation, and was allowed to donate up to three times per week.

So, $105 / week or $5,460 / year.

That would be about $10k / year in 2025 dollars.

The clinic was a ten minute walk from my workplace, so I'd walk there and back on my MWF lunch breaks.

Collect a rent from OpenAI everytime some little girl asks mommy to print some Disney Princes invitations to her imaginary tea party.

More and more it seems like OpenAI's business model is turning into pure accounting gimmicks.

Options on datacenters that will never be built, investments from vendors who make the hardware (vastly more technically complex) OpenAI needs to do what they do, so OpenAI can turn around and spend it with them, and now money from mouse they will return in license fees..

Can't wait to read the reports when OpenAI goes tits up, its going to be Enron level exciting.

Right, the impact here really could be quite substantive. Take a look at SOAPwn as an example. It maybe wasn't found with AI but its the kinda bug fuzzing could have found and LLMs would actually be great at generating exploits for/against.

We are not talking about an issue in some random github project that got a little to popular to fast here, were talking about vulnerability that has existed in the .NET distribution for a very long time. The recent experiences with OpenSSL are again instructive, maybe its had many eyes being FOSS for a long time but, there are still as many rocks nobody has looked under.

I think we in for a rough five years or so in terms of having to patch major tech stacks at fire drill speed. I hope I am wrong.

Was the test available at the time? Did other sperm banks check for this mutation?

Way more than that. It was 200 babies, not 200 attempts. The success rate of artificial insemination is about 20%, so that's 1000 squirts.

I was a sperm donor back in the 1990s.

The donors aren't "random".

They are screened for general health, genetic defects, and academic achievement. I had to show my college transcripts, provide a blood sample, and have a medical examination.

TFA describes a screwup that only happened because a test for the condition wasn't available. But many other tests were done, so the odds were still better than an old-fashioned insemination.

Many of the recipients are women in nuclear families, whose husbands have fertility problems.